Princess Loser

I had my appointment on Tuesday with the BOTOX doctor. (He’s just another neurologist in the practice with my neurologist, but he’s younger and has apparently been schooled in the use of toxins for neurological issues.) It was interesting. Actually, it pretty much sucked. I have a hard time with appointments for just about any kind of problem. I end up making light of problems, even if they’re nearly crippling me. This time was no different.

He asked me how many days I have headaches. I told him 20. He asked how many were severe. I told him 15. The truth is that I have headaches more often than that and that they are severe more of the time. I didn’t tell him this because my mind was doing this kind of warning thing, where I thought that if I told him the truth that he would think that I was just a drug addict.

Well, apparently, my answers were so off that he was “worried” that I might be having rebound headaches. He was still planning on submitting the paperwork to my insurance to get the BOTOX injection approved. He wants me to go off the Tramadol to prove that I’m not suffering from medication-overuse headaches. Since I’m not using the Tramadol as often as I do the Zanaflex and the Flexeril, and because I still have some Tramadol from October, I really don’t think that is the issue.

I was a bit annoyed by the speculation that I might be overusing pain medicine. I get why he thought that. I mean, I was making weird jokes, which I blame partly on my tendency to make light of my health issues and partly on my having taken 2 Flexeril earlier in the day. I also told him that I was having pain in my neck, was on Effexor for depression, and had trouble sleeping. Of course, I’ve been on the Effexor for over 10 years, and I have had a lot of trouble sleeping throughout my life. I also told him that before my current medicines I’d had problems with Migranal and Imitrex. He didn’t know that I had problems with Migranal because I have bad reactions with caffeine. He also didn’t know that the Imitrex bad reaction happened the very first time that I took it, and it wasn’t a rebound headache. It was more like serotonin syndrome. Anyway, for those things, I’m not that annoyed by him.

I am, however, annoyed that this man couldn’t be arsed to look at the damn file or any of the tests and notes done by my neurologist. I’m pretty damn sure that if you have a chart in front of you that has recent MRI and EEG results, as well as God knows what other tests my neuro has done over the past several years, that you look at that chart. Otherwise, why have a chart?

Anyway, to prove that I’m not overusing my pain medicine, I am going to be switching from it to Elavil. That makes me a bit uncomfortable since I’m also on Effexor, which he hinted that he wanted to take me off of. (If he tries, I may have to resort to some violence.) He also suggested that I get my eyes checked, because he thinks I have a lazy eye or something. He checked my eyes, doing the movement test first (and stalling forever at the upward part at the end) and following with an external examination of my eye test, which he ended up triggering a massive migraine. (The left eye didn’t take long, but he seemed to be obsessing over something about my right eye. He ended up getting extremely close to me, with his hand on my face, and it seemed like he was looking at the right eye for about five or six minutes. My photosensitive eyes didn’t like this, thus the migraine.) I was not happy to leave an appointment about headaches with a worse headache than I’d come in with.

Mirrored from fuzzypinkslippers.com.